Herbicide heartache

8Plain

If you're like many of my callers, you've been suffering from one of these new and mysterious ailments: Camellias, azaleas, roses and other shrubs show grossly distorted leaf growth, each leaf branch dwarfed, curled in on itself, with vivid yellow stains. Trees and shrubs decline mysteriously, start losing leaves or fruit, or even die outright. Lawn grasses mope after they've been fertilized, as if the fertilizer made them sick.

Often, the disease is nothing more and nothing less than a gardener who hasn't figured out that herbicides were designed to kill plants.

If you use weed and feed fertilizer and herbicide combos regularly on your lawn, I can just about guarantee you that trees, shrubs and flowers in or adjacent to the grass are suffering from at least some herbicide damage.

The outward signs of damage may be as dramatic as the conditions described above, or a few leaves may simply appear chlorotic and a little pekkid. But the net result of this slow, per sistent poisoning will be trees, shrubs and flowering plants that are slow to grow, less resistant to pests and disease, and generally unhealthy. Some common herbicides may even prevent shrubs and trees from flowering and fruiting.

The herbicides used in many of those weed and feed products are designed to be soil-active — that is, they move through the soil searching out the roots of plants they're designed to kill. Your lawn is likely host to as many tree and shrub roots as grass roots. There will be no way to apply soil-active herbicide to the lawn so that it doesn't come into contact with tree and shrub roots. And virtually every ornamental plant or tree is going to be susceptible to the effects of lawn herbicides, because their inner workings don't differ greatly from those of the weeds the herbicides were supposed to kill....